I need to know if there is an alternative to crosswalk that i can use in my ionic project. On Android OS 4.1 my app does not act normal but it is okay with higher OS's, i added the crosswalk plugin and it works very well across all OS's but then i am faced with the challenge of larger apk size which i do not want as my boss want's the apk as small as possible...with crosswalk what used to be less than 8mb becomes 36mb which i feel the increase is sooo much...please has anyone come across a similar situation and found an alternative to crosswalk or maybe someway to make their application work properly on lower OS?
There is no crosswalk alternative at the moment. Crosswalk has also been discontinued as of February 2017.
For anyone building Cordova apps in 2018, the best way forward is to take advantage of Progressive Web App capabilities.
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My company recently came up with an idea to include using smartwatches with the app I wrote using codename one.
Is this possible? If yes, which libraries do I need?
We are evaluating the possibility of smartwatch support, this depends on customer demand.
We currently have a major enterprise prospect that has expressed interest in this but hasn't signed up. If your company is serious about this please contact us directly.
Assuming we don't go that route or you need something immediately this depends on your supported platform, you would need to use native interfaces for most functionality. In Android notifications (which we support) should work for Android wear. In iOS we are transitioning to the new xcode 7.x which should support smartwatches too but I'm not sure what would need doing.
I finished 1 Project in Pure GWT and 1. in SmartGwt. However I want to support a Mobile version of both Projects now.
I found :
mgwt -> which has a medium Community, documentation is well made and under heavy development.
SmartGwt - Mobile -> which has a low Community, documentation is not that good, development idk..
Both have a Showcase site.
I personally liked the SmartGWT-Mobile Showcase better.
But the point that mgwt gives me better support is huge!
My questions is now :
1.Mgwt or SmartGwt mobile or together?
I think the answer depends on your strengths itself. I tried both of them when I started building cross platform app.
Smart GWT Mobile
+ve:
Easy to start working with
Large number of ready to use components.
-ve :
Support is an issue.
And if there is some thing the framework didn't support, it was hard to get it done.
The Smart GWT performed best when the server side also used Smart GWT. Even though Smart GWT mobile is free, I was not comfortable since they may tie it up to server similar to Smart GWT some time in future.
mgwt
+ve:
of course, open source.
good support on google forums. Normally the questions are answered on mgwt forums and occasionally Daniel Kurka also jumps. Daniel is creator of mgwt and he is also a member of GWT steering committee.
The themes in mgwt are good. The L & F just matched the ios or android platform.
I can extend it easily if some component is not available or if I didnt like any thing.
-ve:
limited number of components.
It takes time to set up and start using.
Slow updates.
Finally I went with mgwt since I have a team which can open up the code and fix it, if they see any issues.
Sencha Touch is brilliant but IE cannot open websites which is developed using Sencha Touch.
I am not interested in using IE, but my opinion is not important since many others may use it.
Since Microsoft announces HTML-5 Support and I have worked with the great tools to make native apps even using HTML-5 and Java so it is obvious that IE 10 must support HTML5. But it seems sencha touch websites cannot be explored by IE 10 too, since I cannot explore Kitchen Sink (on sencha.com) using IE 10 however I can easily do this using Chrome.
Further to this problem, I want to make an web-site for a small company, is it right to use Sencha Touch to develop it or jQuery is a better choice? (I yearn for you say Sencha Touch :) since I am completely unfamiliar with jQuery)
I appreciate the time you are spending.
Sincerely yours,
PEYMAN MORTAZAVI
Call me old-fashioned, but when I see the Kitchen Sink demo failing in IE10, I blame the developers behind the demo, and not those behind the browser. IE10 is an oustanding browser that is worthy of our attention, and not merely for the fact that it will be used by millions upon millions immediately following its official release, but also because it's a great browser from a technical perspective.
If you're going to build a solution for your clients, you should avoid libraries that wish to distance themselves from supporting half of the market, meaning they don't actively develop with IE in mind. The excuses for not supporting IE simply aren't there today as your code won't require that much variance to work properly in the latest version of Microsoft's browser.
Use jQuery, jQuery Mobile, or jQuery UI. You can get some great UI from and with all of them, and you'll find excellent support in all major browsers.
I am porting my Sencha Touch 2.0 app to 2.2.1 in order to support IE10.
So I have first-hand knowledge in the effort.
all Sencha websites / apps build previous to 2.2.0 and by developers targeting webkit browsers will never work on ie10 reliably because a bunch of stuff had to be done to the core of Sencha Touch in order for ie10 to work. Everyone has to go back and do what I'm doing... line by line of CSS and a few JS changes as well (esp if you do canvas stuff)
Running an old "kitchen sink" which was not properly architected for 2.2.1 and tested on IE10 is not going to work either. I do not know how much time Sencha folks spent testing kitchen sink on IE10 ...but one would assume...
I think what has thrown Sencha for a loop is developers don't have time or money to build business apps twice - once on ExtJS for laptop/desktop and 2nd time on Sencha Touch 2 for tablet touch/gesture support. This is the strange land of SDK's because the tablet real-estate so closely resembles that of a small laptop -- ergo as long as your UX people a really good, they can architect an experience that crosses over from tablet to laptop pretty good by building one code base in Sencha Touch.
But oooops - Sencha figured we'd all be building to small phones - a market dominated by webkit browsers. If that were the case, then this argument of IE market share would not hold - we all know Windows Phone numbers. It's hard to fudge/spin that. What's causing the rub is the tablet-laptop screen size being so similar.
IMHO...
IE10 in the Windows 8 preview is the same version that is slated for the tablets and mobile devices they have been producing. Saying it is for desktop support is not a very useful statement. The problem is this is what Microsoft is about to spend a very large amount of money marketing and pushing to businesses. This is not a case of a tablet/phone library not supporting a desktop, but of a tablet/phone library not supporting a target platform that is about to have billions of dollars of marketing spent to deploy it.
Any mention of Internet explorer seems to evoke deep emotion in everyone! However IE is a fact of life.
I would suggest that you use Google Chrome Frame. The first time IE visitors arrive at your site you can alert the user to install Google Chrome Frame and redirect them. It's a bit messy for the first visit but after that it should be seamless.
As I understand it Google Chrome Frame no longer requires admin rights to install.
Obviously people should just install Chrome in the first place but nobody's perfect.
Sencha Touch 2 is not designed to work on IE10. If desktop support is important for you, then you should use Ext JS 4.
Chrome and Safari use WebKit which Sencha Touch requires in order to function.
Internet Explorer might be able to display Sencha Touch apps in the future:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/11/06/microsofts_ballmer_considers_using_webkit_within_ie.html
http://www.favbrowser.com/opera-firefox-and-internet-explorer-to-implement-webkit-prefixes/
But who knows?
I had spent a month getting a project to work with Sencha Touch, but had to choose a more accessable framework. The goals of the project were to work across as many browsers (desktop and mobile) as possible. The webkit preference for Sencha, while admirable in how it is achieved, made it unusable for my needs.
I am glad they changed their licensing since I tried it. That was the second stumbling point for our project.
I have been looking framworks for developing mobile apps and i have been told to work on rhomobile framework but i did google and i found very limited resources and tutorial... my apps are bit complicated and at this point i am not even sure rhomobile framework is good choice....
do you guys think it will worth investing time in learning?
any suggestions?
Thank you,
It depends on your requirements. If your application is data centric then I highly recommend Rhomobile, and If your application has less data and more static page then better use Native frameworks.
You can quickly start with following resources http://rhomobile.com/resources/
If you have some knowledge in ruby it is not very difficult to start using rhodes, but it will always depend on your requirements and on how much time you want to invest to develop apps for different OS.
I have found Rhomobile very easy to follow. Of course it is limited as it is a relatively new framework, but you can get very good help on their Google Group.
I have developed on iOS and Android, and I must say I hated Objective C. Android with Java was more familiar and easier for me, but still, it is not compared to doing one app that works for all (even though you have to make dome minor tweaks for each OS).
One thing I did have problems developing in Rhomobile was working with maps. Rhomobile's Maps have different limitations depending on the OS of deployment.
Anyways, specially if you are working by yourself, I would recommend experimenting with Rhomobile. I believe you will get your job done faster that developing for each one (Objective C is a nightmare!)
One thing I love about Rhomobile Rhodes framework is their support for those old Symbian S40 phones, although they are not the mainstream phones today but still those platforms need to be supported in many enterprise apps
Basically i would like to know which platform is currently used to develop mobile applications i.e. J2ME etc etc...
Also any new ideas on mobile applications would be quite helpful.
Generally, the approach is to go for a website, if possible, and adapt it to each phone using a 'device detection layer'. We use DeviceAtlas.
If you want to write native applications for each phone, then you need to do it in each of the native languages (and there are a lot).
Symbian/Java: Greatest 'penetration'
iPhone/iPod Touch: Latest trend, objective-c for this.
Android: I think this is a variant of Java, and will be a very marginal component of the market for a long time, though maybe high among a certain type of techies.
Basically, you are going to need to profile your market, and determine the best approach. But as I said, in general, you'd prefer a website, and mostly, a website is all you need.
There is a framework called Rhodes by Rhomobile that allows development of native applications for all major smartphones. See my answer to a similar question earlier this year.
We are primarily targeting the iPhone, but don't always make an iPhone-specific application. The web browser on the iPhone is good enough that a lot of our web apps just run there ok. So many of the apps we're writing continue to be done using the same platforms we've always used. We're a big institution so this runs the gamut from J2EE and .NET to Php and Ruby.
Mobile-only apps are developed in XCode (or web versions in DashCode).
If you need to cover multiple mobile (esp. smartphone) platforms, Javascript (with HTML and CSS) may be the only way to go, despite all its limitations. You get under the radar of Apple's iPhone app vetting, it's the only way to target Pre, you can also cover Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, AND Nokia on a single codebase... unless the limitations are just TOO stifling for your specific purposes, it sure seems like the way to go!